Puppygames releases Droid Assault on Steam!

BriefingOne of the Omni-corp facilities has been sending logfiles about malfunctioning droids to the headquarters. After extensive testing and running simulations of the entire facility failed to reproduce the problem, bearded men suggested to send in a droid to get clues. A scrap z001 droid was repurposed into a remote control Z001 Virus Drone and shipped to the problematic facility. Arguably with a dash of luck, they picked you to control it, right from the comfort of your home. You will lead the rest of Omni-corp to prosperity by clearing out the place.

Briefing UpdateThe newly developed virus was designed to be simple and effective, but had unforeseen side effects. Once you gained root access to one of the malfunctioning droids, its anti-virus freeware will do everything in its power to override the commands sent to motors and actuators, leading to a bit of gear grinding, slowly wearing out your droid. The beards released patch 1.03a of the virus, enabling us to copy the virus from any infected droid to another, provided we gained enough know-how (through destruction) to punch through its specific firewall. It's up to you to build an army of tormented droids, or upgrade your lone droid to and beyond its physical capabilities.

Briefing Update #2 - Save ChristmasMeanwhile, Omni-corp has expanded its research and develoment department and developed nano-bots. Or that's what the beards called it, they are just a tad smaller than the earlier models. It took 18 months to get these bots to be certified as 'safe for children'. In good christmas spirit, a guy in the marketing department opted to send these blinking guard toys to children in need to give them a christmas to never forget. Eggheads at the head quarters green lighted the project and within weeks the warehouses of Omni-corp began to fill with presents. Gerald, from the mail room, felt being the responsible one and asked whether the latest firmware patch had been uploaded to the nano bots. A resounding facepalm echoed through the office and the distribution dept. was called. Unfortunately nobody answered the call as an unauthorized office party had the employees occupied. The gift wrapped presents are about to be shipped to little children and you are our last hope, as you have been randomly assigned, again, to clear out the warehouse!

We need you folks playing the demo! Please report any graphical glitches, especially around the shadows as that's brand new code and should really be thouroughly tested on a wild variaty of gfx cards and drivers.

Play it!!

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Heh, I found myself wondering if something was wrong with my display when the picture started rolling, then I realized that hey this is the 21st century and that's an effect

It's an awesomely slick game, though two things come to mind: those "how to play" screens should be something shown gradually in a tutorial level, not all up front. And two, it just begs for controller support.

Graphically speaking it's just amazeballs. Never thought I'd see a "fat pixel" style game look so slick and polished.

For those wondering what I've been working on the last few weeks, here's a screenshot of the line-of-sight effect that was added to Droid Assault:

A screenshot really doesn't do it justice (if I may say so). Ingame, it adds quite a bit to the atmosphere of the game, as you always get the sense that there may be danger lurking behind the corner, even if you've just been there.

Most of the work was getting it fast and easy on the eyes. The bruteforce approach looked awesome, but required a beefy gfx-card to keep up with the fillrate and bandwidth requirements. Going back to hard shadows was not really an option, because it lacked the subtlety that was required to feel immersed while playing. The 'penumbra' hack I posted about earlier was also not adequate for the game, as the range of hard and soft shadows was exceptionally hard to control, especially when the light source was in close proximity of the occluder. We wanted a soft line-of-sight, not necessarily realistic shadows as 'the player' is not a light source after all. Realism is an artist's nightmare. So we ended up with an algorithm that simply created a fixed width area around the hard shadow, interpolating black to fully translucent. After that (and I quote) 'looked great' and 'still needed some hax', it was time for some serious optimisations, eventually reducing geometry by factor 15 and overdraw by factor 20. Even the absolute low end of the market should now be able to get creeped out.

Meanwhile... Cas, Chaz and the others have been working on the actual game. It certainly has been an interesting experience. After the dust settles and christmas is over, we will continue, full steam ahead, on our next game!

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We wanted a soft line-of-sight, not necessarily realistic shadows as 'the player' is not a light source after all

Yes, that's exactly what bugs me about these LOS systems that black out all the areas unseen and update them for every pixel you move -- it's a lot of distracting activity revolving around what you're not seeing. I prefer when games keep things as they were the last you saw them, and just don't update areas you're not seeing, and just gradually darken areas that are "definitely out of sight".

I donwloaded the tar.gz from puppygames, extracted it and run the droidassault.sh... At first a window opens up, then shortly after that it goes fullscreen. (That's expected behaviour, I'm pretty sure, right?)

The problem is, that linux, fullscreen and dual-monitor-desktops don't like each other. I've got 2 1280x1024 monitors stretching together to a 2560x1024 desktop... The app starts in that resolution fullscreen, but it's only able to show on one monitor. This means the right half of the application is not visible to me.

Now what's the problem with this? Just go to "options" and then uncheck "fullschreen"...

The problem is that my mouse is capped to 1280x1024 pixels when the app is active, I dunno why... And I can't click the checkbox (or whatever... I cant see it ...) for disabling fullscreen... It's on the right half of the application.

What should I do? (Except for doing super-magic and getting linux, fullscreen and dual-monitor-desktops to like each other)

Either try adding -Dnet.puppygames.applet.Game.windowed=false to the JVM args, or as commandline args, enclosed in quotes, try something like"vx=0 vy=0 vw=1024 vh=768" (or whatever) to specify a viewport. Not sure if that still works and too drunk to be inclined to test it right now Happy xmas!

Daedelus has a ways to go before its LOS effect looks like the one in DA

lol the only difference I see is the "smooth transition" between visible and invisible parts ... which is I think unnoticeable when playing as both Daedalus and DA are fast action games ( only a game programmer will notice this ).But I admit that this smooth transition makes yours a bit more awesome

Talking of which... Daedelus needs, I think, a more awesome single player game behind the tech!

I completely agree ! The thing is that Daedalus is only one year old in dev ( woohoo champagne ! ) and I'm doing it alone - code, graphics, sound ( I finaly got rid of Quake 3 sounds ) and music ... all of this on my spare time as I have a job to pay the bills I would really love to make a single player mode which is not just multiplayer vs bots, but I prefer to concentrate on finishing the multiplayer part first, otherwise I will never finish the game ( not easy to keep motivation on a big project like that when working alone )

lol the only difference I see is the "smooth transition" between visible and invisible parts ... which is I think unnoticeable when playing as both Daedalus and DA are fast action games ( only a game programmer will notice this ).But I admit that this smooth transition makes yours a bit more awesome

It's much more cunning than that! Notice also how the monochromed map tiles rendered lose all their detail and decals outside of the LOS, eg. lights. That was almost a happy accident due to the design of the tileset.

It's much more cunning than that! Notice also how the monochromed map tiles rendered lose all their detail and decals outside of the LOS, eg. lights. That was almost a happy accident due to the design of the tileset.

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